Locally, nationally, and globally, modern society worships Growth Everlasting above all else. Economists preach the gospel of growth. We’ve built a system that has us addicted to growth. Real estate developers, chambers of commerce and economic developers are pushers lobbying and propagandizing to keep us hooked.
As a professional filmmaker I decided to produce this film as an intervention. Your friends and family, business associates, elected representatives – and even your priest – all need to see Hooked on Growth, so we can recognize the addiction and begin the recovery. This film examines the superstitions and outdated beliefs we must leave behind in order to become a sustainable society.
Please join the effort to help get this film shown in your community!
Today we sadly bid a fond farewell to Ursula Sommer, our incredible volunteer assistant editor for the past two months. Ursula is a recent Colorado College graduate who became excited about my documentary, Hooked on Growth(in production). She wanted to work on this film. In this era of tight finances, we were unable to raise the funds to pay Ursula for even a summer internship. But because she believes in the cause, she donated her time. She even had to acquire a better bike to navigate the hills that dot her five-mile commute every day.
Assistant editor Ursula Sommer sips coffee and logs an interview
Ursula has been a joy to have around and a tremendous help in the edit suite, helping us catch up on getting all our interviews logged and onto our hard drives so they can be transcribed and edited. This weekend Ursula is off to New York City, where she will begin work on the for-profit side of the film and television business. She’s been a joy to have around the office. We wish her well and hope this is not goodbye, but just “see you later!”
Now, thanks to Ursula, I have more interviews than volunteer transcribers, so if you’ve been looking for a way to get involved in the project, this is a good excuse to contact me. Join transcribers in London, Sydney, Seattle and D.C. working to make Hooked on Growth a reality!
Earth 2100 is an ABC News (U.S.) special that will air the evening of June 2. At the show’s little-tended website one finds hope for a remarkably candid (especially for the U.S.) look at the sustainability predicament we find ourselves in. From the program description:
What could our world look like over the next one hundred years if we don’t act now to save our troubled planet? The world’s brightest minds agree that the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could converge with catastrophic results.
This is heady stuff, since climate change makes a few headlines, resource depletion fewer, and population growth is almost universally ignored as a multiplier in the equation that represents human impact on our planet.
I was hopeful last December when I discovered this program and its invitation for the public to submit videos offering solutions. With the deadline less than two weeks away, I shifted into high gear, wrote a script, put out the casting call, assembled a great team of over 30 volunteers, and created this “public service announcement” about aiming for stable or declining population as one of the solutions to the problems this special will examine.
I’m sorry to report that ABC News has refused to post this Population Solution video on the Earth 2100 website or include any part of it in the special. The producers have offered an array of excuses which don’t hold water. I’m left to conclude the population taboo is at work here. I guess, as is too often the case, while the producers may see population growth as contributing to the problem (a step in the right direction), they cannot wrap their heads around the idea we ought to actively, vocally, and responsibly do what we can to reduce the growth rate to zero as soon as we can.
There is still much work to be done. We must have more conversations, open more eyes, and enlighten more minds. Population’s role in our predicament and it’s role in the solutions must not remain taboo. My documentary, Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity, will examine this taboo. Talking about it will help to chip away at it. When it comes to overpopulation, hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, and speak-no-evil will not serve us well. I can’t finish this film soon enough!
Be sure to take a look. Maybe they’ll surprise us. The trailer includes sound bites from Paul Ehrlich, Richard Heinberg, David Pimentel, Lester Brown and James Howard Kunstler, among others. Earth 2100 airs June 2, 9 to 11 p.m. EDT and PDT.
This opinion piece in USA Today really gave me pause. Author Laura Vanderkam celebrates the fact that U.S. fertility rate rose 22% from 1976 to 2007. And she suggests increasing it even further is a worthy goal. I’m not kidding. Here is her rationale:
Between bank bailouts and the stimulus package, it’s no secret that our government is spending like a megafamily at the grocery store. But both of these pale next to the looming problems of Social Security and Medicare. With fewer workers supporting an aging population, Social Security, for instance, will exhaust its trust fund about 2041.
A higher birthrate could ease that. The youngest Boomers won’t retire until 2030 or so,when children born today enter the workforce. A baby bulge over the next few years could push off the day of reckoning, and the economic growth a rising population causes will shrink our debt to a more manageable percentage of GDP.
Aside from being pregnant, Ms. Vanderkam has no credentials to make her an economic or demographic expert, a shortcoming she clearly displays with this glaring absence of mathematical ability and lack of big-picture, long-term thinking. Judging by the on-line comments to her column, many readers recognized her plan for the unsustainable Ponzi scheme it is. But I feel compelled to underscore just how utterly ridiculous is the notion that we can “grow manageably” as she puts it, and solve the problems of the growing U.S. deficit.
So, let’s do a little simple math. Let’s say the women of America don’t swallow Vanderkam’s hogwash and we don’t further increase fertility rate. Let’s say we just stay at the current annual U.S. population growth rate of roughly 1%. Certainly Ms. Vanderkam would consider that “manageable.” At that rate, we double our population every 70 years. That means in 2079 U.S. population will be over 612 million. And in 2149 it will be 1.2 billion - equal to today’s China population. In 2219 it will be nearly 2.5 billion. How manageable is that? Today, at 306 million we can’t keep everyone employed, California doesn’t have enough water to supply agriculture, and USA Today is too busy to find a columnist who understands overshoot. Let me assure you, the costs of trying to meet the needs of even 600 million people in the U.S. will dwarf the current financial crisis. Her solution is no solution at all.
Let me be clear, I’m happy for Ms. Vanderkam and her pregnancy. Everyone has a right to make a family. In fact, I want very badly for her children to have happy, healthy lives; that’s why I want prospective parents everywhere to simply understand the consequences of having large families, so they can make informed, responsible, compassionate decisions about family size.
Producing Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity, I of all people am well aware of the proliferation of mindless ignorance of the fact we are in overshoot (our planet’s population is beyond a sustainable level). Yet when a prominent national publication like USA Today gives ink to this kind of drivel, I shudder. And I call it like it is. Forgive me. I know it’s impolite. But when growth-boosting baby-terrorists like Vanderkam are on the loose, it is no time for diplomacy.
Since today is Earth Day it seems fitting to write something about the event and our efforts to Save the Planet. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to save the planet, though apparently many self-centered human beings do. So, even more fitting, on Earth Day, is a humorous yet deadly serious Earth Day essay by Joseph Romm. Please spend 8 minutes of your Earth Day reading his commentary. Then let me know what you think. Then, let’s get back to saving the planet, for it is the only way to save ourselves!
I owe you an election report on my recent city council run in my hometown of Colorado Springs. I wasn’t sure the citizens were ready to embrace a modern, sustainable economic model that recognizes perpetual growth is impossible. But I thought I might get traction from the fact that growth is no longer profitable. My city, like most, and like our entire nation, is in a state of crisis. Our tax revenue is down thanks to the collapse of the housing and consumption bubbles.
As I feared, current leaders believe we just need to rev up the growth engine to solve this problem (their faith in growth everlasting prevents them from seeing that our growth boom of the past two decades created more problems than it solved). It created costs faster than revenues. And it didn’t exactly do wonders for our quality of life. I wanted to offer an alternative to re-inflating the housing bubble, a smarter, more sustainable long-term solution.
We captured much of the campaign for use in my documentary, Hooked on Growth, so I thought I’d share some video highlights with you.
In running I sought to do an intervention - spotlighting our city’s growth addiction and getting us into a recovery program. What is happening in Colorado Springs is a microcosm of what’s occurring on the world stage. If we perform a true accounting of all the costs of physical expansion and population growth, we find these activities do not generate true prosperity. That’s good news, as it means we do not have to sacrifice to get unhooked from growth addiction. We will be better off in every way to get on a sustainable path of economic and population stability. This council campaign served as a proving ground for this “good news” message, which is the message of Hooked on Growth.
The election was April 7, and I surprised many with a very respectable 43% of the vote. The incumbent, with substantial growth industry funding, garnered 2,000 more votes. Does this mean the public will respond to the good news that getting unhooked from growth will help us achieve real happiness and true prosperity? If I’d won by a landslide we could be more certain. In my view, the jury is still out.
More Information:
Campaign Website (includes endorsement video from former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm)
This documentary takes a unique slant on sustainability by examining how public policies and superstitions at every level of government affect the sustainability of our behavior. I often ask, “How can we expect to achieve global sustainability if our planet is full of communities acting unsustainably?’
Of course I’ve been working on that very issue in my own community for years, trying to inject some prudent, rational, long-term thinking into what was rarely even a debate about my community’s addiction to growth.
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted in 2 months, it’s because I decided in January to kick it up a notch. I entered a local city council race. I decided to run because my city, like most cities and even the entire U.S., is facing a funding crisis. Instead of rampant consumption, citizens are now being very thrifty, diminishing sales tax revenue. Instead of enjoying the quick hit of sales tax revenue from new construction, the city is now stuck serving subdivisions that have never provided the tax revenue necessary to serve them.
The local Ponzi scheme has collapsed. And I was afraid our elected officials would want to solve the problem by repeating the mistakes that got us into this mess. Sure enough, they have a tax increase on the ballot - not to provide essential services, but to gamble on antiquated “economic development” schemes to steal employers from other communities and rev up growth. They believe growth will solve all the problems it actually created.
So my time has been completely consumed attempting to help my community understand: depending on physical expansion and population growth as a prosperity engine is an outdated strategy that no longer works. I’ve got a couple more weeks left in the campaign. If you’re at all curious, feel free to check out the campaign. I’m putting a few noteworthy links below.
We’ll see if the voters in my city are ready to embrace a more enlightened, sustainable approach to community prosperity, And in the process, we’re collecting some fascinating footage for the documentary!
We are hooked on a system that depends on growth
